


When only the sky is wide enough

by jamlocked



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Canon Death, Minor Character Death, Non-Graphic Sex, Teenagers, early years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-01
Updated: 2016-04-01
Packaged: 2018-05-30 13:21:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,459
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6425638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamlocked/pseuds/jamlocked
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim has always been a strange boy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When only the sky is wide enough

 

 

 

Jim’s first memory is of his brother’s face, soft and brown-eyed. His own hand rests on one smooth cheek. There is a picture of a dog in the background.

  
He tells his mother this two years later. She says he can’t possibly remember the picture of the dog. They left that house when he was eleven months old. He must be imagining it.

  
He is asked about it again at six, but by this time no one is surprised at the things Jim Moriarty’s brain can do.

 

*

 

His school gets a computer when he’s ten. It is 1986, and the machine is a BBC Micro. Jim joins an after-school club, his first, to get more time on it. He queues silently while the other kids chatter, and throw things, and push each other around, enduring their noise and swear words they’ve learned off their Da, their boasting about football and cars, their endless, mindless vapidity. It earns him ten minutes of a bright blue screen, and flickering yellow hands of a clock dial teaching him how to tell the time. He’s been able to do that since he was eighteen months old, and can’t hide his disappointment at the wasted potential of the thing. He’s pushed out of the seat by Davey McKay before he can try anything more interesting.

  
Father Moore lets him come in at lunchtimes to play on it for a while, until he catches him rooting through the system folders. When he comes in the next day he is told gently, but firmly, that he needs to go and play with other children.

  
The computer is stolen three days after that. There’s a special school assembly called about it, with parents invited and everything, and teachers imploring the thief to bring it back. This is a bad area of Dublin and the school does not have the money to replace it. If anyone knows anything, please do the right thing.

  
Jim does not go to the assembly. He’s ill that day, puking his breakfast into the outside lavatory while his ma rubs his back. His brother finds him shivering in the shed the following midnight, wrapped up in scarf and bomber jacket, trying to press the right keys to reprogram the thing through the fingers of thick gloves. It’s a cold winter. There’s ice on the one wobbly electrical socket out here.

  
‘How’d you do it, Jimmy? They’re all saying the police don’t have a clue. How’d you get it home? Ma’s going to murder you.’

  
He doesn’t bother replying. He doesn’t say much at all, about anything. There’s no point, because no one understands. When he asks questions about the universe and the stars, and non-linear equations, and tries to explain that there are as many even numbers as natural numbers, even though odd numbers are also natural numbers, he is told to go and play. He thought he was playing, but apparently he’s doing it wrong. So he says nothing and stares into this new world, called _code_ , and knows it is a language he can make himself understood in.

  
His brother does not tell their Ma, and the computer is found outside the school office on Monday morning, none the worse for wear. Jim’s learned all it can teach him over the weekend, but he still doesn’t talk to his brother for a month. Except one word (‘So?’) when it’s pointed out to him that the entire student body would lose out if he kept it. He tunes out the explanations of how other children deserve to learn too, and opens his library book on computers. They’ve given him a special adult card, in light of his…well, in light of _him_. He’s allowed one grown-up book a week alongside the useless children’s stories, as long as he doesn’t try to take out anything that has sex or blasphemy in it. He’s not interested in sex or blasphemy. He speaks in math these days, and wanders the rough Dublin streets with his eyes on the sky. There’s space in the heavens for the scope of his thoughts, room to stretch the numbers out and draw his ideas across the universe. _Big dreams_ , his Ma says. _What did I do to deserve you?_ and then she dies, and Da moves Jim and his brother to England.

 

*

 

Sussex, 1987, shows him what money looks like. People commute into London in sports cars with phones pressed to their ears, and the TV has endless reports on skyrocketing house prices, a booming economy, the yuppie chic of the Thatcherite set. Striking miners and picket lines fade under the flash of new money, and Jim walks home from school along streets that are not littered with broken bottles and used needles, where no walls bear IRA slogans or cries for an Ireland made whole again. And that’s good, because Republicanism is stupid and pointless, and the monarchy is stupid and pointless, and if people could only fly above it all and look down, they’d see that there are no lines drawn across the globe, it’s all just one space, and fighting over land that’s going to exist long after every human is dead is the biggest waste of time of them all. Sometimes he imagines himself the only person left, and what peace it would bring. He liked that when he was eight, nine, ten. But he’s eleven now, and conscious of some gnawing tension in his gut, a feeling that maybe all those teachers, his father, the kids in Dublin, maybe they had a point. Maybe it’s not him that’s right. Maybe it’s them. Maybe he’s _wrong_.

  
He has never liked being wrong. He tries an experiment, and talks to another quiet boy in his class. His name is Terry and he’s a runt of a thing with glasses, and a crew-cut, and asthma, who idolises Ian Rush even though he’s never been to Liverpool in his life. Jim despises football, but he accepts an invitation to go to the park after school one night. After ten minutes of stilted conversation, in which they establish that Terry can only do the most basic sums and likes English over algebra, Jim’s ready to call this a waste of time. He watches the kid wheeze towards him with a ball, and turns to walk away. But he slips on some mud and Terry happens to catch the ball with the side of his foot, and miracle of miracles, it curls around him in a perfect nutmeg. Terry barrels past and collects it, and manages to hit the back of the net. Jim watches him celebrate and laugh, and talk to him like he’s normal for five minutes straight (‘ _Did you see that!? Ian Rush eat your heart out, GOOOOAAALLLLL_ ’), and knowledge falls into his seething brain, that this is how people bond, by doing stuff, and if you do the stuff they like and make them feel good about it, they like you without question.

  
But maybe it only works on stupid people. The next day, Jim goes to his lunchtime chess club early and sets up the random draw to see who’ll play who. He fiddles it so he comes up against the boy who always comes second, then deliberately loses the match. The boy’s name is Christian, and he walks out of the classroom next to Jim, explaining where he went wrong and how he could avoid it next time, telling him he should come around his house after school next week so they can play again.

  
Jim goes, and loses again, and nods and smiles as Christian eagerly sets up a new game and chats away about how much better he’s getting – he beat Jim Moriarty twice! – and pities the creature for being so, so dense.

 

*

 

The gnawing tension only grows. His father tells him the school will not allow him to sit any exams early. Something about being bad for children to advance too quickly, about them needing to socialise among peers, develop skills other than the academic. They will try to find someone who can teach him advanced maths, if the Education Board can afford it. They do appreciate the problem, but young James cannot go to university aged twelve, no matter how good he is. Besides, he has to learn French, and English, and Home Economics.

  
Jim teaches himself French from books and old library cassette tapes in one week flat, and turns up after Spring half term completely fluent. The French master turns white, and goes silent. He is told to go and wait outside the headmaster’s office, so he does. He is asked if it’s a trick. He’s asked if he knew how to speak French all along. He looks from teacher, to headmaster, from one pale face to another, and admits that yes, he was taught back in Dublin. They visibly relax, even smile a little. His insides curl up on themselves, hit with the sudden knowledge that this is his life, and will be his life, and there is no escaping it. Stares, and disbelief, and hatred because he can do what they can’t. The alternative is to lie, to hide, and educate himself.

  
He asks his father to request a copy of the school syllabus for his year, and learns all of it by heart by the start of summer term. That leaves fourteen long weeks before the holidays, with nothing to fill his days but what he chooses to put in them. He raids the adult library for maths and physics, astronomy and philosophy, and sticks them inside the books they’re working on in class. He reduces music to numbers, and becomes the music mistress’s favourite. Football, tennis, cricket – trajectory, pressure, speed, it’s all an equation just waiting for application of the correct force. He’s asked to join every team, and says no. Except swimming. He likes swimming. He likes being weightless, the feeling of support from something you can never grasp. Ironically, it is the one sport in which his body refuses to live up to the math. He has to try, and appreciates it all the more.

  
When he’s asked a question in class, he knows the answer. He bakes a perfect Victoria Sponge in Home Ec. He makes a shelf in CDT, and designs a house. He excels in art, because lines and curves are nothing but angles, and he has no trouble seeing a shape for what it is. That is all the world is, different shapes fitting together to create an illusion. A nose is a triangle. An ear is a crescent. If you put them in the right place, they make a face. Jim draws faces and listens to the radio, where Thatcher’s government lets the rich get richer, and the IRA are blowing up every bit of England they can reach. Power is an illusion, he thinks. British strength is created off the back of history, from the days they ruled the world. Take an alliance away, government becomes weak. Push the economy too far, boom becomes bust. Lose a contract to build nukes, you’re no longer a world power. A few bricks pushed here and there, the whole thing will tumble down.

  
He thinks about that a lot. Jim likes economics, and he’s tired of being poor. But he likes the sky better. He likes the space. He likes the distance it gives him, from all these stupid, stupid people.

 

*

 

Carl Powers is a name bandied around the changing room at every swimming gala. Everyone in the team’s division knows about the _wunderkind_ , this eleven year old who’s already beating kids two divisions higher. There’s talk of the British team, and him being taken out of his school for full-time training. Even rumours about a special training camp in America, and a fund being started to send him to school over there. They have better facilities for his talent, so it’s said. They’re willing to help him develop. Not just yet, he’s only eleven. But next year, maybe. The year after. _Soon_.

  
Jim changes into his Speedos amid this talk, and the tension inside starts building into rage. So if you can move fast through water, you get to go places and learn things? _That’s_ what it takes for someone to show interest? His jealousy is a living thing that eats him from the centre out, so when he comes face to face with young Mr Powers he hates him on sight. He says nothing to him, but the anger affects his performance. Jim comes sixth in a field of eight, and Carl breaks a national record for his age group.

  
He changes in a cubicle afterwards, unwilling to show his face in the communal area, and so he hears when Carl starts to laugh, and talks about the runt who freaks everyone out; he hears when boys from his school agree that Jim Moriarty is a weirdo, and thinks he’s really clever but everyone knows he doesn’t do anything in class. How he’s probably letting the masters fondle him in return for letting him off homework, and his brother beats up anyone who says bad stuff about him, so he probably lets his brother do stuff to him too.

  
He wonders why they think he can’t hear them. He knows they’re stupid, but _that_ stupid? And then he realises that no, of course they know he's listening. They just don’t care.

  
Carl grins at him when he emerges, and makes a show of putting his back to the wall in case Jim decides he might want some of him. He covers his wet Speedos with his hands, and says, ‘ _don’t look, gayboy_ ’, so the others laugh and do the same. It’s just him, and fifteen lads with their backs pressed to the sopping walls. At least one of them is hiding a stiffy, but no one laughs at _him_. Jim looks into Carl Powers’ eyes, and hurt turns red, loathing into contempt, contempt into disdain, and from there it’s a short fall to the inevitable conclusion. Jim Moriarty is thirteen years old when he realises he’s going to kill someone. It feels like the first time he read Einstein, and relativity clicked into place. Like it’s something he’s always known.

 

*

 

There’s a big inter-school gala set for the end of summer term. It’s four weeks away, so Jim returns to education. He’s focusing on game theory at the moment; Minimax, and the Nash equilibrium. He is also interested in girls as an experiment, to see what they can offer, and so remembers to be charming. This culminates in something other people might call a girlfriend, a pudgy creature called Stephanie who giggles when he takes her hand after school and turns red when he touches her breast. It’s soft under the stretched material of her white school shirt, and he’s not sure he likes that. She tells him she’s too fat to be touched, so he tells her she’s not, and that he likes it, and is there something wrong with him for being thin? She is quick to reassure him that he’s perfect, but he makes her feel a bit funny when his hands wander, so he reminds her that she’s perfect too. She doesn’t believe him, so he shows her what funny things her fat body makes his do. She looks nervous, but is persuaded to touch it all the same. It’s different to when he does it himself, but it’s all right. She gets better over the next couple of weeks, and then he walks her home from school one afternoon, and her parents are still at work so they can go to her bedroom without being told to keep the door open. He pushes between her legs on a bed covered with stuffed animals, and posters of New Kids on the Block watching him from the walls. She is wet, and smells weird, and her tits fall to the side when set loose from her bra. It’s a mess but it’s good when she clutches at him and moans, and for the first time he can remember, he feels _surprise_. His body jerks on its own, outside of control, and heat digs its claws into the muscles of his lower abdomen. Her hands pull him deeper, and he had meant to watch her through all of this to see what happened, but the numbers of her reactions, the pressure and force get jumbled and swept away in something far stronger. Her noise is annoying, but doesn’t stop him releasing, pressing as deep as he can go, grinding against her bucking pelvis. Later, he will think that she was far more ready for that than he was, but in the moment of it, he thinks about _nothing_. It is a glorious reprieve from himself.

  
She wants to touch him, afterwards. Shyness comes back, and she insists on covering herself with the duvet. It doesn’t stop her touching between his legs, seeing what he looks like, how everything feels and hangs. He doesn’t mind, but he’d like to be allowed to do the same to her. He tells her to come round to his tomorrow. His brother has cricket after school, and his dad will be off somewhere. They can do it again. She says yes, and he goes home via the library, where he picks up a book about chemicals. He has not yet found what he’s looking for.

 

*

 

He discards game theory in favour of surveillance. He tells his brother he’s going to hang around with friends, and takes the bus over to Carl’s town. Extensive reading over the last year has told him that CCTV has not yet made it to this part of Sussex, except in some shops and he’s not going into any of them. He watches until Carl’s mum takes him to swimming, and then it’s a simple matter of walking down the alley at the side of his house and hopping over the fence into the back garden. From there, through the door into the kitchen and up to Carl’s bedroom. It’s a disgusting mess of dirty clothes and crisp packets, and there’s obviously a family cat that likes to sleep on his bed. There’s a porn mag under the mattress but no evidence of masturbation, so he’s probably not there yet. His posters are of cars and swimmers, and the current Arsenal team. There’s a team kit in the wardrobe, and shin pads under the desk. A prescription box lies next to the bin, and it’s this Jim picks up to read.

  
It proves stupidly easy in the end. All it takes is finding the right poison. He imagines it won’t always be that way – youth has some advantages, one of which being _almost_ exempt from suspicion – and he knows no one will look too far into something that looks so much like natural causes. He is not expecting the rush of euphoria as he watches Carl struggle and die in the water, the feeling of triumph that leads him to take his trainers as a prize. It is a strange, alien thing; something he assumes other people must name _joy_. He thinks about it all the next day, sitting at home because the swimming team have been given the day off to deal with their shock. He is alone until three thirty, because Da had snorted and said, _you’re not in shock, are you Jimmy? You don’t know what shock is_. He’d gone to work, and his brother had gone to school, and Jim lies on his bed with his hands behind his head, hard and excited at this strange new sensation. Stephanie rings the bell at half-three, and he leads her to his room and persuades her to take him in her mouth until he gasps and comes, spilling out of the horrified ‘O!’ of her mouth. She cries a bit, not liking the taste, having expected him to warn her. He says sorry, aware that euphoria is turning brittle and dry inside him, ready to crumble. Fear of losing it makes him angry, but he has long since learned to present the face that will gain him most advantage. He says sorry again, and kisses her, and says he’ll make up for it. His brother told him about oral years ago, in a misguided attempt to shock a reaction out of him. He had thought it sounded disgusting, and it’s not that appealing now. And she’s shy, boring, telling him it must be horrible and what if she tastes bad and she doesn’t think…she doesn’t know…and he forces himself not to roll his eyes, and smiles instead, eases her knees apart and shows her how wrong she is. It is as off-putting as he feared, but she’s squealing in no time. He thinks of Carl Powers lying on the bottom of the pool, the long, pale length of his back, the Speedos tight to the curve of his backside. He had jerked, and twitched, just like Stephanie is under his tongue, and Jim finds himself hard and desperate, pushing into the blanket and then into her, holding her wrists by her head, grinding deep and strong, remembering just what it feels like to take. The giving is a by-product; she comes hard and can’t stop shaking, and it’s two days of brand-new highs for him, this one second only to the sweet tang of murder.

 

*

 

‘The coppers are having trouble with some kid, and Carl Powers dying.’

  
It is an innocuous remark over breakfast, Da not emerging from behind his newspaper. It’s Jim’s brother who’s left to ask, because Jim is busy wondering if he should feel curious, or worried, or what. The truth is, it’s like it happened a hundred years ago, not a week. Like it happened to someone else. Death has cut all connection, and he has returned to his studies.

  
‘What d’you mean, Da?’

  
‘Some kid keeps ringing the copshop, and asking where the shoes are. Heard about it at work. Pauline’s old fella is desk sergeant at the nick. He says they keep getting called by a ten year old, telling them to look for his trainers.’

  
Jim swims back to the present. He asks if they’re going to, and gets a snort for his effort.

  
‘’course not. Natural causes. Waste of time. Anyway, stuff’s always being nicked out of changing rooms.’

  
He thinks about how clean they are, how white Carl kept them, how he’s been wondering what he should do with them now. They’re wrapped and in a box, hidden in the rafters of the school’s cricket house. Summer holidays have started, so he’s got time to think about how to proceed. It would be sensible to burn them. Logical. But the thought of giving them up doesn’t sit easy, and Jim has always known he’s the kind of man who’ll listen to his urges.

  
‘Little public school prick, apparently. Says Carl’s been murdered and called Pauline’s husband stupid. Ten years old! Sherlock Holmes, his name is. Twat.’

  
Sherlock Holmes. Jim rolls the name around in his head, tastes it on his tongue. He expects to feel nothing, and is surprised again – murder has opened a whole new avenue of sensation – discovering a flare of anger buried within. He had _thought_ about this crime. He researched it, and broke into Carl’s house, and found the right poison, and watched him get changed and slipped it into his medicine. And now some stranger, some child, has noticed the one way in which he gave in to temptation, and…for the first time, there is a new possibility. A voice from nowhere, a policeman who might listen, tests on the corpse, a knock on the door. For the first time since knowing he was going to kill him, Jim wonders if he’s going to get caught.

  
Da gets up, folding his newspaper and tossing it down on to the table. ‘You boys behave yourselves today. No running around, no fighting, no stealing, and be back for tea. Got it?’

  
He’s looking at Jim’s brother, the girl-mad sports nut, who spends his time hanging around town with a group of long-haired idiots. Everyone present knows Jim will stay inside, alone. He’s the good one, after all. They sit, the two of them, long after the front door has slammed and Da’s car has pulled out of the drive. The house settles. Jim considers finishing his toast, and thinks _Sherlock Holmes_ instead.

  
‘Tommy Greaves said he saw you on the bus a few weeks ago. That night you said you were going out with mates. ’

  
Jim’s brother takes a packet of fags from his pocket, and slides one out. Jim says nothing. He wonders where Tommy Greaves lives, and what might be necessary to make him shut up. He looks at his orange juice, and wishes it came without bits in it. The kitchen smells like boiled eggs, sticky yolk, salt on the back of his tongue. He thinks, _better plans next time_.

  
Jim’s brother stands up.

  
‘I told him he was wrong. That you were here with me.’

  
He looks up to the face looking down at him. He remembers his own hand resting on that cheek, chiselled now, no longer soft, and wonders what he’d been trying to touch all those years ago. He has a vague recollection of wondering how to get inside, to reach behind the smile. Or maybe he was reaching for the darkness. They have the same eyes, brown and deep, except his brother has life behind his. When Jim looks in the mirror, the empty universe stares back.

  
‘I was here with you,’ he says, and his brother nods. For a second, there's a question in view. But it clears almost at once, and Jim hears _Ma’s going to murder you_ whisper through a corner of his mind. And then he’s sitting alone, big brother off to hang around the park, to fight and steal and not be home for tea, because he’s the troublemaker of the family and everyone knows it.

  
Jim looks at his left hand when the echo of the front door has died away. The clock ticks on the wall. Sun streams through the window, brushing heat across his cheek like a kiss. _Sherlock Holmes_ , he thinks. It’s not a common name, and there are not all that many schools in the area. The police station will keep records of who has phoned them, and why. Maybe even on computer. _Sherlock Holmes_ , he thinks, and the summer stretches out before him, unrolling its endless, mindless days, just waiting to be filled with a brand new project. _Sherlock Holmes_.

 


End file.
